Fun with a fresh bomb at Erebus volcano

This past field season (winter 2013), Erebus volcano was churning out more volcanic bombs than usual. The very lucky field team even got to play with some freshly erupted ones and watch the still molten insides flowing! These bombs can be anywhere from the size you see in the video below to the size of a garage. They are phonolite in composition and come straight from Erebus’s phonolitic lava lake that sits in the summit crater. Generally, the farthest the bombs fly is about 1 km from the crater.